SNA All Star: Barry Wellman

Canadian-American sociologist Barry Wellman is one of the pioneering minds of social network theory and methodology. He founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis and currently serves as the director University of Toronto's Net Lab, a scholarly organization that studies "the intersection of social networks, communication networks, and computer networks."

Wellman's work uses a highly interdisciplinary approach, collaborating with the likes of archivists, scientists, lawyers, statisticians, communication scientists and theologians to develop his unique ideas of social network theory. Particularly, Wellman's research focuses on "computer networks as social networks" and "community networks as social networks." Wellman discusses how people have progressed from "little boxes" (densely clustered groups of people) to "glocalized" networks (sparseley-knit clusters of both globally and locally linked households) to what he calls "networked invidualism" (sparseley linked individuals linked together that transcend limitations of  physical space.) More recently, Wellman has shifted his research focus to the internet, studying topics such as our currently wired state contributing to "glocalization" and international comparisons of internet usage. 

Wellman is vastly published and connected to several thinkers.  He has written on "network of networks" and "the networked city" with behavioural economist Paul Craven, the "community question" with Bernie Hogen, and "hyperconnectivity" with Anabel Quan-Haase. Notably,  Wellman (along with the late S.D. Berkowitz) co-edited one of the definitive texts of social network analysis Social Structures: a Network Approach, published by Cambridge University Press in 1988. He also recently co-authored Networked: The New Social Operating System with Lee Rainie (the Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, published by MIT Press in Spring 2012. 

In 2014, the Oxford Internet Institute awarded Barry Wellman the Lifetime Achievement Award, "in recognition of his extraordinary record of scholarship in social network theory and Internet research which has contributed so much to our understanding of life online."